GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs GeForce 9800 GTX+

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB features a core clock frequency of 513 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 792 MHz. It also uses a 320-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 90 nm design. It is comprised of 96 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 20 ROPs.

Compare that to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, which has GPU clock speed of 738 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 1100 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 128 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.